A homily for Septuagesima Sunday by Ælfric of Eynsham

Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 2: Aelfric, homily for Septuagesima Sunday (fragment) (/en/list/one/fmb/cb-0002).

Introduction

It was common in Anglo-Saxon England for priests to not only preach the gospel to their congregation but also interpret its content and explain how its lessons could be applied to everyday life. This was the purpose of the so-called homilies. A homily entails biblical texts, usually in narrative form, with a subsequent explanation for its listeners.

This particular homily (“Homily for Septuagesima Sunday”) was composed by Ælfric (c. 950-1010), who was monk, priest and eventually abbot of Eynsham. He authored two series of homilies, many of which have survived in libraries and collections to this day. One of the reasons why so many of his homilies have survived is that, due to Ælfric’s popularity during and after his lifetime, they were copied extensively. Thus, a multitude of versions of each homily exists. Of this homily ("Homily for Septuagesima Sunday") alone, eleven manuscripts have endured over the centuries. However, the present manuscript fragment was not meant to last: In the 16th century, the homily was deemed superfluous and a fragment of it was re-used as a cover wrapper for an edition of De Quattuor Virtutibus by Dominicus Mancinus, published in 1601. The manuscript fragment was not detached from De Quattuor Virtutibus, until the book was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 1934, and at that time the fragment was finally recovered and in 1962 it was moved as a separate item to the Bodmer collection in Cologny.

The content of this manuscript fragment includes a description of the biblical parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20: 1-16) and the beginning of its interpretative, explanatory section. The transcription exercise will focus on the latter. 

This manuscript is written in insular square minuscule. The word spacing is tricky here, as orthographical conventions at the time were different to our current ones. Try to thus separate unsegmented text into single words and to combine spaced out morphemes to form one word. The Tironian nota ⁊ is consistently used for the word and. As the text is written in Old English, we find the letters ash (æ), wynn (ƿ) and thorn (þ). The flat-topped g (ᵹ) character has a long pointed tail and is written as a g. Moreover, the letters f (ꝼ), r (ꞃ) and long s (ꞅ) are sitting on the baseline, which sometimes makes r difficult to distinguish from s and f. Abbreviations should be written out in full.